Description

Circe
Natasha Dalard – France
Medium: faces, hands: air dry clay painted with acrylics and protected with a matte varnish
Hair: natural fiber.
Body: wire armature, textile
Outfit: upcycled vintage fabrics
Art Size: Height: 22.05 inches / 56 cm from the top of the hat to the bottom of her dress

Posable doll.
Upcycled vintage fabrics, mostly upholstery fabric or costumes, old wooden boxes. They may have imperfections such as : visible stitches ,white fabric yellowed , signs of wear … They lived a life before and still do in another form: that’s what I’m looking for.
Faces are not smooth.
Clothes are sewn in and not removable.

The glass in Circe’s hand was added for the photo shoot: it is held in place by a string.

I roam mountains and forests in search of treasures that Nature has left behind; I gather them, It is, then, a long process to reshape ,to give them a form, a face, and an expression all their own and breathe life into them and stories to tell you.
Each piece is completely unique : I never use molds.

“Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed”. (A.Lavoisier)

Circe / Mud Poems (excerpt)

Men with the heads of eagles
no longer interest me
or pig-men, or those who can fly
with the aid of wax and feathers
or those who take off their clothes
to reveal other clothes
or those with skins of blue leather
or those golden and flat as a coat of arms
or those with claws, the stuffed ones
with glass eyes; or those
hierarchic as greaves and steam-engines.
All these I could create, manufacture,
or find easily: they swoop and thunder
around this island, common as flies,
sparks flashing, bumping into each other,
on hot days you can watch them
as they melt, come apart,
fall into the ocean
like sick gulls, dethronements, plane crashes.
I search instead for the others,
the ones left over,
the ones who have escaped from these
mythologies with barely their lives;
they have real faces and hands, they think
of themselves as
wrong somehow, they would rather be trees.
It was not my fault, these animals
who once were lovers
it was not my fault, the snouts
and hooves, the tongues
thickening and rough, the mouths grown over
with teeth and fur
I did not add the shaggy
rugs, the tusked masks,
they happened
I did not say anything, I sat
and watched, they happened
because I did not say anything.
It was not my fault, these animals
who could no longer touch me
through the rinds of their hardening skins,
these animals dying
of thirst because they could not speak
these drying skeletons
that have crashed and litter the ground
under the cliffs, these
wrecked words.